The Yermakov Transfer

by Derek Lambert

  Gopnik opened a cardboard case and consulted several sheets of paper headed Ukranian Academy of Science. “Like most people,” he said. “Since June, 1967.”

  “How many times have you tried?”

  “Twenty.” Gopnik ran his finger down the list. “The Director of the Department of Internal Affairs … The Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the U.S.S.R. … the Prosecutor General of the U.S.S.R. … the Chairman of the Commission of Legal Provisions of the Council of Nationalities, Comrade Nishanov … the editor of Literaturnaya Gazata, Comrade Chakovsky.…”

  He paused for breath. “You see, I’ve tried.”

  “Yes,” Pavlov said, “you’ve tried.”

  “My story is the same as that of any Jew with brains. You can see the Russians’ point – ‘Why give your brains to the enemy?’ “

  “Why do you want to go?” Pavlov asked.

  “Why? You ask why?”

  “Russia’s a good country if you accept their laws, if you live as a Russian. There’s not much anti-semitism these days, only anti-Zionism. Jews are getting places at universities if they toe the line like everyone else.”

  “Perhaps,” Gopnik said thoughtfully, “you’re not a Jew at all. If you were you’d understand. The persecutions of the past, the attitudes of the present – they all count. But they’re not the end-all of it. I want to go to Israel because it is my land.” He paused. “Because it is written.”

  Pavlov stood up. “Then you shall go.” He began to walk towards the car scuffing the leaves with his bright toe-caps. Unconsciously, he was taking long strides, hands dug in the pockets of his coat.

  Gopnik hurried beside him, scarf trailing. “What do you mean?” His voice was agitated. “I don’t want any trouble. None of us want trouble.”

  Pavlov walked quicker as if deliberately trying to distress Gopnik. He spoke angrily. “You don’t want trouble? What the hell do you expect to achieve without trouble? The Jews didn’t want trouble in Germany.…”

  Gopnik panted along beside him. “You don’t understand. If we cause trouble we’re lost. The pogroms would start again. Back to the Black Years. The way things are we’re winning. More and more Jews are being allowed to leave. Soon, perhaps, we’ll all go.”

  “All three million?”

  “They don’t all want to go. But the policy’s changing. We’re winning.…”

  “Grovelling,” Pavlov snapped. “Forced to crawl for a character reference from your employer, permission from your parents – or even your divorced wife, suddenly given fourteen days to get out which is never long enough, body-searched before you leave, paying the Government thousands of roubles blackmail money. Is that victory?”

  “It’s suffering,” Gopnik said. “It’s victory.”

  They passed some boys playing football, a couple of lovers arm in arm. A jet chalked a white line across the blue sky above the soaring Cosmonauts Obelisk. There didn’t seem to be much oppression around this glittering day.

  They reached the car. A militiaman in his blue winter overcoat was standing beside it. He pointed at the bodywork. “One rouble fine, please,” he said. “A very dirty car.”

  Pavlov let out the clutch savagely and headed back towards the Kremlin. “I’ll get you out,” he said. “Don’t worry – I’ll get you to Israel.”

  Gopnik said: “Please leave me alone. Let me find my own destiny.”

  “By crawling?”

  “Don’t you think we’ve been through enough without hot-heads destroying everything we’ve worked for?” He wound down the window to let in the cold air, breathing deeply as if he felt faint. “Who are you anyway? What do you think you can do?”

  “I’m a man,” Pavlov said, “who thinks there is more to be done than writing letters to the Prime Minister of England, the President of the United States and Mrs. Golda Meir.”

  “What can you do?”

  The Volga swerved violently to avoid a taxi with a drunken driver.

  “I can show the world,” Pavlov said, “that we have balls.”

  * * *

  They met mostly in the open air, on the Lenin Hills, or in the birch forests to the west of the city where Muscovites went swimming from the river-beaches in the summer and cross-country ski-ing in the long winter.

  Sometimes they met in a small apartment near the junction of Sadovaya Samotetchnaya and Petrovka. While they talked about Moscow Dynamo football team, mistresses and money they systematically searched the room for microphones. De-lousing it, they called the process. So far no bugs had been found.

  They only met three at a time to avoid arousing suspicion. On this evening there was Pavlov, Yury Mitin, poet and State prize winner, and Ivan Shiller, a journalist on Pravda specialising in Jewish affairs. Each had cultivated an anti-Zionist front; none had Jew on his passport.

  Each was fierce in his belief, none more so than Shiller, his anger fomented by the daily betrayals he had to perpetrate in his newspaper. Yesterday he had finished rounding up fifty prominent Jews and ordering them to sign a letter condemning Israeli aggression in the Middle East.

  The letter also referred to emigration. “We were born and bred in the Soviet Union. It is here that our ancestors of many centuries lived and died. There is no reason why we should go to Israel. And, anyway, how is it possible to ‘return’ to a place where one has never been?”

  “And do you know” – Shiller spoke with bitter contempt – “that some of them were quite happy to sign?”

  Shiller was second-in-command of the Zealots who took their name from the 960 Jewish martyrs who killed themselves rather than surrender the citadel of Masada to the Romans. Death before dishonour. The Masada Complex symbolised the spirit of Israel: it symbolised the spirit of Russia’s small band of Zealots.

  To avoid detection they used code-names each having a trade beginning with the letter P in the English language. Pavlov was the Professional, Mitin the Poet, Shiller the Penman.

  Shiller was a gaunt man with a muddy complexion, hollow cheeks and bad teeth. His repressions were even stronger than Pavlov’s because, unlike Pavlov, he was a practising Jew. His greatest temptations came at such times as the New Year and the Atonement or the days when Yizkor, the prayer for the dead, was offered. Then he wanted to visit the Synagogue; but if he did he would alert the police. Even to be near the synagogue on Arkhipova on the Sabbath was dangerous because it was under K.G.B. surveillance. So Shiller prayed in private, ate his matzos in secret, recited the Passover prayer “Next year in Jerusalem”, and waited.

  In one way Shiller was weaker than Pavlov: he was too religious to be a ruthless killer: Pavlov had no such inhibitions. But if there was ever to be any rift, any struggle for power, it would be between these two men.

  The apartment belonged to Mitin the poet. He made coffee while, on a rickety table covered with linoleum, under the benign gaze of Lenin framed on the wall, the other two men played chess. A get-together of old friends should the 1 a.m. knock on the door be heard.

  Shiller said bitterly: “Last week I helped to arrange the publication of a statement from our religious leaders. “Like citizens of other nationalities, Jews enjoy all the rights guaranteed by the Constitution, including the right to profess their own religion.”

  He knocked aside one of Pavlov’s pawns with his bishop. “I got six so-called Rabbis’ signatures on that statement.”

  “Shit on the Rabbi,” said the poet. He was a slim young man with a pale face, a monkish fringe of hair and a foul mouth. Whereas Shiller would have liked to smuggle Bibles into Russia, Mikin would have liked to smuggle Soviet literature out. His frustration found a small outlet in profanity, the brutalising of his love-affair with words.

  Pavlov said: “We mustn’t get impatient. We’re all making sacrifices. We are getting nearer our goal every day.” He moved one of his own black bishops and called: “Check.”

  “What goal?” Shiller asked. He frowned at the wooden board and pieces made in a labour camp. “Since when have we
had a goal?”

  “Piss on you,” exclaimed the poet. “We’ve had an ideal for years, a goal for months.”

  “Ah,” Shiller muttered, “that goal. I apologise. I thought for a moment Pavlov meant we had a way of achieving it.”

  Shiller moved his knight and Pavlov said: “You’re in check. Perhaps you misheard that as well.”

  Shiller took back the knight without apologising. “How are we getting nearer our goal?”

  Pavlov took a sheet of paper from his pocket. It had eleven names on it. Pavlov read out the first name, adding the data from memory.

  “Skolsky.” He paused, thinking. Yosef Skolsky, aged forty-two. Top physicist at the Scientific Institute of Nuclear Physics, Moscow. A pupil of Academician Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet atom bomb, our leading dissident. Two applications for exit visas to Israel. Refused on the grounds that his relatives in Tel Aviv were too distant.”

  He read out another name. “Kremer, Yakov. Corresponding member of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences. Aged fifty. One application refused. Again – remoteness of kin.”

  The penultimate name was: “Zivz, Mikhail. Aged twenty-eight. Brilliant nuclear physicist working at the Scientific Research Centre in Akademgorodok fifteen miles from Novosibirsk. Permission refused once. Reason – still subject to Army service.”

  The last name was Gopnik.

  Shiller asked: “Who’s he?”

  Pavlov swooped with his queen. “Checkmate,” he said.

  “Who is Gopnik?”

  “My conscience.”

  Mitin served the coffee. “Since when did you have a conscience?” he asked.

  Pavlov sipped the sweet black coffee. “It doesn’t matter.” He ran his hand through his hair. “What matters is this: ten of those eleven names constitute the human components of one hydrogen bomb. Quite a gift for the Promised Land, eh?”

  * * *

  But how? Part of the answer came to Viktor Pavlov at the Leningrad skyjack trial. This skyjack had failed miserably, but even if it succeeded, it would only have benefited a handful of nonentities. And, in any case, skyjacks were old-hat, bearing the hallmark of Arabs, Cubans and maniacs. An old-fashioned kidnap had more panache.

  Once again the adrenalin started to flow. What if they kidnapped a Kremlin leader and held him against the release of the ten nuclear-physicists? The idea had a beautiful suicidal glory to it, the Masada Complex. Except that it was totally impracticable.

  Or so it seemed until Viktor Pavlov heard that Vasily Yermakov was travelling on the Trans-Siberian Railway in the October of 1973, the year of the 25th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel.

  CHAPTER 2

  The first stop was Yaroslovl. Trans-Siberian No. 2 pulled in sharp at 14.02 Moscow time. But it wasn’t until Sharia, which they reached on time at 20.22, that the first Zionist agent boarded the train.

  He was a stocky man with a white face and a scar beside his mouth. He wore a black overcoat, fur boots and a sealskin hat.

  He stood near a stall where blunt-faced women wearing blue scarves round their hair sold food from a canvas-covered pushcart. Meat pastries, fried chicken and fish, icecream and beer.

  As the train slid into the station the agent whose name was Semenov clapped his gloved hands together. Cold or nerves or both.

  The Trans-Siberian hadn’t yet reached the snow. But the air was sharp with frost glittering on the platform. It was almost dark.

  In the lighted window of the special coach he saw Yermakov’s face. The glass had misted-up so that the outlines were blurred; it reminded Semenov of a face masked with a stocking.

  Framed in a window of coach 1251, Semenov saw the face of Viktor Pavlov. He shivered inside his warm overcoat and took a white handkerchief from his pocket. Pavlov’s face faded.

  Before the train stopped K.G.B. officers dropped off like commuters late for work. They lined up the waiting passengers and began to check their papers. Local militia who had already done the job protested but they were pushed aside; it reminded Semenov of the airport scene at the time of the abortive skyjack when Moscow and Leningrad security officers fought each other.

  Semenov was fourth in line. He handed his papers to a brusque K.G.B. man. The K.G.B. officer glanced at them, smiled slightly and said softly: “Welcome aboard, Comrade.”

  Semenov the Policeman, a member of the K.G.B. with the best cover of all the Zealots, nodded and climbed into a carriage. The cover also enabled him to carry a gun.

  * * *

  Standing beside Pavlov in the corridor, was Stanley Wagstaff, the trainspotter from Manchester. His mind was a filing cabinet of railway statistics and trains were his substitute for the hungers that affected other men; if his wife ever wanted to divorce him she would have to cite a locomotive.

  For twenty years Stanley Wagstaff had saved for this trip. He knew the Trans-Siberian’s history, every station, every class of locomotive.

  He pointed into the gathering darkness and said to Pavlov: “See those over there?”

  Pavlov looked, dimly seeing the silhouettes of old black steam engines with coal cars; they looked like a herd of elephants shouldered close to each other.

  “There’s fifty of them,” Stanley Wagstaff informed him. “Sad, isn’t it? A graveyard.”

  “Very,” said Pavlov. He saw Semenov signal with the handkerchief and leaned back against the wall.

  “Did you know,” Stanley asked, “that Russia has the widest gauge in the world?”

  Pavlov shook his head; Stanley thought he detected a man eager to have his ignorance repaired.

  “Yes,” Stanley continued, his voice assuming authority and importance, “it’s five feet unlike the standard gauge of 4 ft. 8½ inches used in Europe and America. Whistler – you know, the painter’s father – recommended it. A lot of people reckoned they had a bigger gauge to stop trains being used by invading armies.” He paused, waiting for reaction; but there was none. “In fact it worked the other way. It’s much easier for an enemy to re-lay one line on a broad gauge than it is for the Russians to widen an enemy gauge. They found that out when they attacked the Poles in the Civil War.”

  The train began to move out of the station. Stanley spotted a stationary engine, whipped out his notebook and recorded its number, JI 4526. “An old L class freight locomotive,” he said. “I wonder what it’s doing here.”

  The stranger didn’t seem to care. He was staring out of the window at the dark countryside moving by. A strong, dark man filled with some inner intensity. But not for trains. Stanley Wagstaff persevered a little longer.

  “Next stop Svecha,” he informed the stranger. “We arrive at 22.14 and leave at 22.30.” His earnest face broke into a grin and he said in his North Country voice: “And I bet it’ll be on time with his nibs back there.”

  “Who?”

  “His nibs. The bloke from the Kremlin.”

  “Ah,” the stranger said. “Yes, we’ll be on time all right.” He spoke good English with a slight accent.

  “Perhaps,” Stanley Wagstaff suggested, “you’d care to join me in the restaurant car? I could tell you quite a lot of history about the Trans-Siberian.”

  The stranger shook his head. “Some other time.” He squeezed past Stanley. “This could be quite an historic trip,” he said, tapping Stanley’s notebook. “Keep that handy.” He opened the door of his compartment and went in.

  Stanley sighed. The alternatives were the American journalist who didn’t look a likely candidate for swapping railway stories, the English girl – women were usually frigid on the subject of trains, regarding them almost as rivals – and the Intourist woman with whom he had already crossed swords.

  Stanley had been telling the three of them how much the Trans-Siberian owed to the Americans and British. He had started with the American railroad engineer Whistler, then progressed to Perry McDonough Collins, from New York, the first foreigner to propose a steam railway across Siberia. “He arrived with red pepper in his socks to keep
out the cold and changed horses 210 times crossing Siberia. He offered to raise 20,000,000 dollars by subscription but the Russians turned it down.”

  The Intourist girl said: “Soon the lights will be going off. We must prepare for bed.”

  Stanley then recalled Prince Khilkov, Minister of Communications, during the construction of the line. “Did you know he was called The American because he learned all his stuff in Philadelphia?”

  The Intourist girl stood up. “Perhaps the Americans have a lot to thank the Soviet people for.”

  Harry Bridges said from his top bunk: “They have – they bought Alaska from Russia for one cent an acre.”

  The Intourist girl said: “Tomorrow we reach Sverdlovsk where a Soviet ground-to-air missile shot down the American U-2 spy plane piloted by Gary Powers.”

  “We get there at 14.00 hours,” Stanley Wagstaff chipped in. “Named after Jacob Sverdlov who arranged the execution of Nicholas II and his family on July 17, 1918. In those days it was called Ekaterinburg.…”

  “Mr. Wagstaff,” said the girl, “it is my job to explain the route.…”

  “Then you’re lucky I’m in your compartment,” Stanley said. “I can help you quite a bit.” He consulted a pamphlet. “We leave Sverdlovsk at 14.18. It’s 1,818 kilometres from Moscow,” he added.

  “It’s time to get undressed,” the girl said.

  It was the moment Libby Chandler had been anticipating with some trepidation. Liberated as she was, she wasn’t happy about undressing in front of three strangers; but, oddly, it was the thought of the Russian girl that worried her more than the men.

  Bridges said: “Okay, Stanley and I will wait in the corridor while you girls get changed.”

  Libby Chandler took out her pyjamas. The Russian girl was already stripped down to her brassiere and panties. Her body was on the thick side, but voluptuous. Libby thought she might put on a nightdress and remove her underwear beneath it. She didn’t. She unhooked the brassiere revealing big firm breasts; then the panties came off showing a thatch of black pubic hair.